Correction: Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Jack AI
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4864305 | biostudies-literature | 2016
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Correction: Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief, Analytic Thinking, Mentalizing and Moral Concern.
Jack Anthony Ian AI Friedman Jared Parker JP Boyatzis Richard Eleftherios RE Taylor Scott Nolan SN
PloS one 20160511 5
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149989.]. ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition. This leaves open two questions. First, is belief linked to social and emotional cognition in general, or a specific dimension in particular? Second, does the negative relationship between belief and analytic thinking still hold after relationships with social and emotional cognition are taken into account? We report eight hypothesis-driven studies which examine these questions. These studies are guided by a theoretical model which focuses on the distinct social and emotional processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (mentalizing) and psychopathy (moral concern). To our knowledge no other study has investigated both of these dimensions of social and emotion cognition alongside analytic thinking. We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern (4 measures), and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking (2 measures) can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking. Using nine different measures of mentalizing, we found no evidence of a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension.
| S-EPMC4805169 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Gervais & Norenzayan (2012) reported in Science a series of 4 experiments in which manipulations intended to foster analytic thinking decreased religious belief. We conducted a precise, large, multi-site pre-registered replication of one of these experiments. We observed little to no effect of the experimental manipulation on religious belief (d = 0.07 in the wrong direction, 95% CI[-0.12, 0.25], N = 941). The original finding does not seem to provide reliable or valid evidence that analytic thinking causes a decrease in religious belief.
| S-EPMC5325262 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Representations of God in art, literature, and discourse range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract. The present study explored whether people who endorse anthropomorphic God concepts hold different religious beliefs and engage in different religious practices than those who endorse abstract concepts. Adults of various religious affiliations (n = 275) completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about God, angels, Satan, Heaven, Hell, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, human suffering, and human misdeeds, as well as their experiences regarding prayer, worship, and religious development. Responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by how strongly participants anthropomorphized God in a property-attribution task. Overall, the more participants anthropomorphized God, the more concretely they interpreted religious ideas, importing their understanding of human affairs into their understanding of divine affairs. These findings suggest not only that individuals vary greatly in how they interpret the same religious ideas but also that those interpretations cohere along a concrete-to-abstract dimension, anchored on the concrete side by our everyday notions of people.
| S-EPMC6306263 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
| S-EPMC2660736 | biostudies-literature
Project description:People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies. We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by downregulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.
| S-EPMC4769621 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundThis study aims to investigate the impact of a leader's beliefs in the usefulness of emotions on the emotional competence and relationship conflicts of their teams.MethodsThe data were collected through an online survey targeting leaders with at least three years of experience in managerial positions in South Korean workplaces, with a total of 326 participants. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted to classify leaders into latent groups based on their beliefs regarding the usefulness of positive and negative emotions.ResultsThe latent profile analysis of the leader's beliefs in the usefulness of positive and negative emotions identified four groups: High Usefulness (HU) Group, High Positive Usefulness (HPU) Group, Reference Group for comparison, and Low Usefulness (LU) Group. It was found that both the HU Group and the HPU Group, who perceive the usefulness of both types of emotions and positive emotions, respectively, showed higher levels of emotional repair and lower levels of relationship conflict within the team compared to the Reference Group and the LU Group.ConclusionsThis study not only fills a gap in organizational research by establishing a clear link between leaders' emotional beliefs and team dynamics but also emphasizes the social influence of leaders' emotions within the team setting. The findings of this research advocate for a strategic update to leadership development programs, suggesting the integration of elements specifically designed to augment leaders' understanding and management of emotional dynamics within their teams.
| S-EPMC11657492 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundWhile religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and others have looked specifically at religious belief [2]. However, no research has compared these two states of mind directly.Methodology/principal findingsWe used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure signal changes in the brains of thirty subjects-fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers-as they evaluated the truth and falsity of religious and nonreligious propositions. For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of "true" vs judgments of "false") was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation [3], [4], [5], [6], emotional associations [7], reward [8], [9], [10], and goal-driven behavior [11]. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.Conclusions/significanceWhile religious and nonreligious thinking differentially engage broad regions of the frontal, parietal, and medial temporal lobes, the difference between belief and disbelief appears to be content-independent. Our study compares religious thinking with ordinary cognition and, as such, constitutes a step toward developing a neuropsychology of religion. However, these findings may also further our understanding of how the brain accepts statements of all kinds to be valid descriptions of the world.
| S-EPMC2748718 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This research provides, to our knowledge, the first systematic empirical investigation of people's aversion to playing God. Seven studies validate this construct and show its association with negative moral judgements of science and technology. Motivated by three nationally representative archival datasets that demonstrate this relationship, studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people condemn scientific procedures they perceive to involve playing God. Studies 3-5 demonstrate that dispositional aversion to playing God corresponds to decreased willingness to fund the National Science Foundation and lower donations to organizations that support novel scientific procedures. Studies 6a and 6b demonstrate that people judge a novel (versus established) scientific practice to involve more playing God and to be more morally unacceptable. Finally, study 7 demonstrates that reminding people of an existing incident of playing God reduces concerns towards scientific practices. Together, these findings provide novel evidence for the impact of people's aversion to playing God on science and policy-related decision-making. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.
| S-EPMC6452244 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Thinking about God promotes greater acceptance of Artificial intelligence (AI)-based recommendations. Eight preregistered experiments (n = 2,462) reveal that when God is salient, people are more willing to consider AI-based recommendations than when God is not salient. Studies 1 and 2a to 2d demonstrate across a wide variety of contexts, from choosing entertainment and food to mutual funds and dental procedures, that God salience reduces reliance on human recommenders and heightens willingness to consider AI recommendations. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that the reduced reliance on humans is driven by a heightened feeling of smallness when God is salient, followed by a recognition of human fallibility. Study 5 addresses the similarity in mysteriousness between God and AI as an alternative, but unsupported, explanation. Finally, study 6 (n = 53,563) corroborates the experimental results with data from 21 countries on the usage of robo-advisors in financial decision-making.
| S-EPMC10438833 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Major stressors can influence religiosity, making some people more religious, while making others less religious. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a mixed-method study with a nationally representative sample of religiously affiliated American adults (N = 685) to assess group differences between those who decreased, stayed the same, or increased in their religious devotion. In quantitative analyses we evaluated differences on sociodemographic variables, religious behaviors, individual differences, prosocial emotions, well-being, and COVID-19 attitudes and behaviors. Of most note, those who changed (i.e., increased or decreased) in religious devotion were more likely than those with no change in devotion to experience high levels of stress and threat related to COVID-19, but only those who increased in religious devotion had the highest dispositional prosocial emotions (i.e., gratitude and awe). Further, those who changed in religious devotion were more likely to report searching for meaning than those with no change, but only those who increased were more likely to report actual presence of meaning. Qualitative analyses revealed that those who increased in religious devotion reported increasing personal worship, the need for a higher power, and uncertainty in life as reasons for their increase in religious devotion; those who decreased reported being unable to communally worship, a lack of commitment or priority, and challenges making it hard to believe in God as reasons for their decrease in religious devotion. The findings help identify how COVID-19 has affected religious devotion, and how religion might be used as a coping mechanism during a major life stressor.
| S-EPMC9994730 | biostudies-literature